Safari browser

I see that Safari 3.1 was released today. The articles I’ve read say that it is blazingly fast. I’ve downloaded it onto my work laptop and will likely see the update ready to install on my mac when I get home. I’ve been using Safari on my mac for a while now (having switched back from using Firefox) because it IS fast, especially in the time it takes to first fire up. On my mac, I click Safari and not a half second later the window is open and loading the home page. Conversly, using Firefox, even the new Firefox 3 Beta 4, it takes quite a few seconds to fire up initially. It’s a different story on my work laptop (a windows machine) and on it I continue to use Firefox.

One of the things that really bothers me about Safari, and it seems to be this way on both the mac and windows version (and has been like this since I’ve been using it – it’s not limited to this new version) is the strange behaviour it exhibits around tabs – specifically opening new links in tabs. In the preferences, under the General tab, there is a choice for ‘opening links from applications’:

• in a new window
• in a new tab in the current window

I’ve selected ‘in a new tab in the current window’, just as I do for the similar preference in Firefox, yet when I click on links in Google Reader, it opens a new frickin’ window! WTF?! In Firefox the behaviour is as expected – it opens the link in a new tab in the current window! Anybody know if there is a way to fix this in Safari?